Feeling a bit disheartened by hearing women say that feminism is nothing more than a label as of late. Feminism is a field of thought as well as activism. It's not a label, it is a term which describes a movement, a culture, and a history.

Feminism is more than just a descriptor for activism or experience. It encompasses writings and thought of women brave enough to speak up and incorporates various disciplines, including science and sociology.

When women say "we don't need the label of feminism," they're participating in the erasure of terms and definitions of words and contributing to the postmodern deconstruction of language.

When women say feminism is little more than identity politics, they are erasing the hard work that many women have died to bring to light, to write down or share; they're undermining feminism as a way of seeing the world based on truths gathered from research.

I proudly call myself a feminist and think of the term as similar to someone who calls themself a philosopher, for example. It is action but also understanding of background, perspectives, research - experiences outside of my own - history, science, and culture, for instance.

Those who call feminism a label or identity are in fact supporting the misuse of the term and disrespecting a large body of work which extends over centuries. Defining feminism as a label enables, rather than opposes, the view that it's reducible to identity politics.

There is a definition of feminism; calling it an identity is not dissimilar from calling womanhood, or any other material reality, a subjective thing.

When I am frustrated by the behaviors of those misusing feminism, I prefer to read feminist research, thought, and work to get grounded, because above all, feminism is work and it is not fundamentally about how I feel about my interactions with those who misappropriate language.

Women don't stop being because men don't want to define us. Feminism doesn't stop being an entire field of centuries of work because some people don't want to define it. Nothing true stops being true because some want to exploit it.

To summarize: things that you don't understand are not yours to define. Don't know what being a woman means? Defer to a woman. Don't know what feminism means? Open a book or ten. I know social media makes you feel like you need hot takes, but just maybe you don't know everything.

Feminism means very, very much. The very fact that it's been maligned, misappropriated and obfuscated shows how threatening and powerful it is.

Associating feminism with an incorrect current definition, and using that as a reason to abandon the term is playing into what is being done by design anyway. It's not an accident that feminism is losing meaning at the same time that womanhood is being labelled as subjective.